June 23, 2011
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Lisa Donneson
You do not need to be a creative genius to innovate effectively, and you do not need to be a comedian to win the The New Yorker cartoon caption contest. In both cases, what you need is a lot of ideas, and a technique to tip the odds a bit in your direction.
Admittedly, the odds of both are daunting. Historical evidence shows that only 0.2 percent of the some 183,000 patents granted annually by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office become successful innovations each year. In the case of The New Yorker, cartoon editor Robert Mankoff recently wrote that “So far there have been 1,449,697 entries and 254 winners. So, roughly, that puts the odds at 10,000:1.”
I beat those odds—winning the contest in February 2008 on my third attempt, using an easy, everyday technique that should be the staple of every attempt at creative, innovative thinking.
Who hasn’t been in an ideation session that hit the creative brick wall—where we look at the whiteboard and see nothing but me-too solutions, tired ideas and ho-hum designs? The creative tension is palpable. If we’re less than diligent, and perhaps low on coffee, we may "satisfice" to release the creative tension. And that’s not good, because it means we haven’t exhausted our best thinking. Suddenly the obvious, but less-than-brilliant, ideas start to look attractive.
Satisficing is the term combining satisfy and suffice that Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon coined over 50 years ago to describe the default decision-making process by which we generally go with the first option offering an acceptable payoff, then stop looking for the best way to solve the problem. Basically, it means latching on to a "good enough" solution.
The truth is that this is how we effectively solve many routine problems, problems that generally only require quick workarounds. Then we just sell the heck out of it. But “good enough” thinking generally doesn’t result in a truly innovative idea. And it certainly doesn’t win The New Yorker contest.
So, back to our brainstorming effort: how do you breathe new perspective into a problem? You need to get away from the beaten track a bit with your thinking. This 15-minute exercise is one of my favorites, and nearly always shakes something loose.
Let’s say your team owns a kitchen appliance company, and the problem is marketing the new refrigerator in the Arctic. (Crazy, I know, but crazy is a good start!)
Generate a random list of nouns. (e.g. shoe, lamp, street, fish, dog, chair, meat, house.) Pick one—let’s pick “fish.” Now list as many characteristics, concepts and ideas as you can think of that somehow relate to “fish” (e.g. swim, ocean, fin, frozen, school, smelly, bait, hook, catch, boat, scale, sushi, flop). Spend five minutes on this.
Pick one or two of those associations and relate them back to your problem. Use them to spark creativity and new ways of thinking about refrigerators. This will help you get off the normal path of ideas associated with appliances. (Example: “frozen” might spur the idea of selling refrigerators to Eskimos to prevent fish from freezing in the Arctic, instead of simply keeping things cold.)
Now use the technique with the real problem you’re trying solve. This is exactly what I did with the cartoon for which I supplied the winning caption. Instead of using random nouns, though, I used the objects and context of the cartoon panel, which showed a couple in bed wearing hazardous material suits. Words like bed, motel, sex, protection, suit, hazardous, personal space, overkill, sickness, etc. (You can see the the cartoon and caption here.)
The thing is, breakthrough thinking actually requires you to break through something, and that something is your normal, linear thinking pattern. By going off-road, you’ll get back on track. You might even consider incorporating The New Yorker weekly contest as a regular part of your ideation sessions. And who knows, in doing so you just may win contest itself.
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Lisa Donneson 11 months ago
I'm trying it right now, New Yorker in hand!